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My wife was in town seeing friends leaving me to get the kids to bed on my own whilst England were playing! It’s every man’s nightmare! Apart from the ones who don’t have kids or don’t see their kids or don’t like football that much.
My solution was to let the kids play on their iPads for longer than they are strictly allowed, bath them during half time and let them stay up late. Everyone was happy and because they knew they’d got special treatment they both went to bed without much complaint.
Everyone was moaning about the game being boring and England being too defensive (it is certainly annoying how no one has scored a goal against them yet, which would really add some jeopardy) until they scored and suddenly everyone was heroes and geniuses. Apart from Harry Kane who was a waste of a player. Until he scored the second goal and was a hero too. England fans are the worst. Even the ones who don’t boo national anthems. Are we the baddies?
The Sun led with the headline “55 Years of Hurt, Never Stopped Us Raheeming” which is one of the most convoluted puns in a good while, even if you ignore the decade of bullying that they’ve led against Raheem Sterling. I questioned whether they were actually trying to pun on ‘rimming”, which was closer than what they were going for. But in a time of national celebration you are allowed to do jokes that require a paragraph of explanation and don’t really work even then.
It’s not even the same number of years of hurt as the song.
They might as well have gone for “I sure love motorcycling over the Germans, Raheem Raheem”. Maybe they’re saving that for Ukraine.
Football remains a game where, at this high level, there is an awful lot of luck. Had Mueller not somehow punted his show wide of the goal then the headlines would probably be back to extreme criticism of Sterling (I wonder
I made more baby steps with the sitcom, but failed to just write anything and got stuck when I tried to work out the history of one of the couples and worried that it didn’t match up with what’s already happened. Which is the kind of thing that I can really worry about later, or not bother worrying about at all, because it’s all just pretend anyway. It certainly shouldn’t be the kind of thing that stops me in my tracks. And as pretend as it may be, my character is going to have testicular cancer, so at the very least I should be able to write a good many of the scenes involving that by just remembering what happened and putting it down on virtual paper. But even by doing two or three bits and having a think about what the other characters might be doing I feel a lot better about the prospect of getting this done. It still feels like a long way until October or November when there scripts need to be ready (though much of August is out due to holiday and I do have other stuff I need to get done in the meantime). My wife had been struggling with the millstone of a deadline too and we discussed how bizarre it was that our dream job can make us feel so unhappy and lost. But that’s partly why it’s a great job and the struggle is occasionally worth it.
And at least with the sitcom (as long as I can finish it) I get the fun of a week in the studio with the brilliant actors and team, which makes it easy to forget the nausea involved in the previous few months.
